[orca-list] Orca and maths

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello,
I noticed today using firefox that orca was speaking the greek letters
in firefox, and I can imagine with the right documentation adding the
other maths symbols (such as integral) would be little work, but how
much work would it be to get orca to support the maths formatting? By
this I mean things like superscript, subscript, and fractions. Also
would it be possible to get orca to switch to a more verbose mode in the
maths environments (as I don't like too much punctuation spoken when
reading a document, but obviously need all the extra symbols in maths).
I know firevox supports mathml (to an extent) so I guess that firefox
makes suitable information available, but correct me if I am wrong.

Let me explain my situation further. I am studying physics at
university, and getting mathematical documents in a suitable format to
read has always been a problem. Due to this I have an interest in trying
to make mathematical documents accessible. While on windows there is
mathplayer for IE, and while it does what it is meant to, I feel it
doesn't make maths as readable as it could be (as screen readers get the
maths written out in words). I think to make it better for users, more
work needs to come from the screen reader side (by having all these
maths symbols known, so that the unicode can be recieved by the screen
reader, rather than the name spelt out).

So I suppose I am asking the following:
Is there any plan to do this?
How could I help out in getting such support for maths in orca (it
couldn't be for a couple of months as I am about to start my final year
exams for my course, but could start after)?
What might be involved in such work? eg. does firefox make this
information readily available, or would that be quite involved just to
find out what the meaning of the maths/what the underlying mathml is.

From
Michael Whapples